CONTACT: Symbiotic Preprocessor Hooks for the Propeller IDE

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Attached is a description of CONTACT, a program that behaves as though it's integrated into the Propeller IDE and which provides the kind of preprocessor hooks I've been advocating — well, okay, agitating — for. The IDE interface was inspired by the work that Ariba did with PreSpin. Through his efforts I realized how much could be accomplished just by sending keystrokes to the IDE. Anyway, I hope people find it useful and that the Parallax developers find it inspirational (hint, hint ). The actual program was too big to upload here but can be downloaded from my website: www.phipi.com/propeller/contact.zip. In a couple days I hope to have a preprocessor for my LMM VM ready to use with CONTACT (which is how this whole thing got started).

Cheers!
Phil

hippy

Looks good. I'm in the wrong OS to try it, but it looks from the PDF screen shot that FLIP replaces the original text with the preprocessed; so would File->Save at that point overwrite the original file and lose the PRE stuff ?

One thing which could help here is a Parallax added IDE menu check-tick option which simply locks/unlocks the text being edited and prevents the file being saved while locked.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

A File->Save in either state preserves all the necessary information. The reason is that preprocessed files contain the original unprocessed source as a block comment at the end. When Flip sees the specially-formatted block comment, it knows to restore the original source from it. In other words, all state information is contained in the file itself. There are no "hidden variables".

-Phil